Jack Yeats, "Seek No Further"

In “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” Roman Jakobson famously grouped the varieties of aphasia around two poles: selection/substitution (“the similarity disorder”) and combination/contexture (“the contiguity disorder”) (1152).  According to Jakobson, the similarity disorder makes metaphor “alien,” and the contiguity disorder has a parallel effect on metonymy.  “In a well-known psychological test,” Jakobson writes,

children are confronted with some noun and told to utter the first verbal response that comes into their heads.  In this experiment two opposite linguistic predilections are invariably exhibited: the response is intended either as a substitute for or as a complement to the stimulus (1153).

The children’s substitutive or complementary (predicative) responses were then also distinguished by different aspects, either positional or semantic.  By “manipulating” such connections and aspects “an individual exhibits his personal style, his verbal predilections and preferences” (1153).  Jakobson’s highly suggestive account of the emergence of a “personal style” offers a striking contrast with contemporaneous accounts like Kenneth Burke’s essays in the 1950s and Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Everyday Life (1959), which stressed the scene of style, or Theodor Adorno’s “Lyric Poetry and Society” (1957), which meditated on the nonidentity of language and experience.

Against both the tactically delimited scene (Goffman) and the negated social totality (Adorno), Jakobson’s work afforded many readers, including Jacques Lacan, a picture of “personal style”—psychic, social, cultural—caused by the operation and differentiation of innate linguistic functions.  Whereas Adorno sneered at those “who will not see [the particular experience of lyric poetry] but merely label it” and Burke’s ratios promised to map the experiential possibilities of an utterance in given social conditions, Jakobson offered a system in which Russian storytellers, surrealists, Cubists, and Charlie Chaplin (to cite a few of Jakobson’s examples) could be labeled and organized within “the bipolar structure of language (or other semiotic systems)” (The Adorno Reader 212; 1154).  The parenthetical status Jakobson assigns to “sign systems other than language”—painting, theater, cinema—within the “general science of signs” is itself a sign of the way Jakobson privileges linguistic deviance in artistic forms over innovation in expressive, performing, and multi-medial arts.  Phenomena from “personal habits, current fashions, etc.” to the ranges of “human behavior in general” turn on the “primal” dichotomy between metaphor and metonymy (1154).

For Jakobson, the “decisive question” at the heart of all symbolic processes is asked by the conflict between metonymic and metaphoric devices (1155).  Stunningly, persuasively, Jakobson rewrites Freud’s interpretation of dreams as the linguistic analysis of, on the one hand, displaced or condensed contiguities and, on the other, identified or symbolized similarities; Frazer’s comparative mythologies are likewise transcoded into imitative and contagious forms of sympathetic magic (1555-56).  From an intrapersonal core split by a crease in language itself, all the energies that Jakobson incidentally describes as disturbed, disordered, broken, and “bent” flow out into patterns of personal style, literary genre, and collective fashion.  Furthermore, Jakobson speculates that critical interpretation often takes “the line of least resistance” by commenting on only the one, preponderant side of these forms: “The actual bipolarity has been artificially replaced in these studies by an amputated, unipolar scheme which, strikingly enough, coincides with one of the two aphasic patterns, namely with the contiguity disorder” (1156).  Critical language is thus also opened to commentary, even if, following Burke or Adorno, we would question the rhetoric of coincidence (i.e. “strikingly enough”), which can itself be a figure for a geometrical relation between vectors sharing a direction but not a magnitude.  Normalizing the aphasic pattern of contiguity disorders with the critical pattern of metaphor-myopia would force us to confront exactly the questions of intentionality and biological inheritance that Jakobson’s opening gambit—the children confronted with a noun—had resolved by appeal to the “invariable” exhibition of the experimental space.

Writing to Harriet Weaver Shaw in 1916, Joyce provides, with studied casualness, a few “biographical items” that had been requested by his publisher (Ellmann, Selected Letters, 222; the moderately ironic quotation marks are Joyce’s).  Noting that “I suppose that is what he means,” Joyce encloses a brief account of his writing, including a judiciously placed bit of retrospective precociousness:  Under the subheading “Irish Literary Theatre,” Joyce writes that Yeats “invited me to write a play for his theatre and I promised to do so in ten years” (223).  Conveniently, Joyce had begun drafting Exiles in 1913 while living in Trieste.  Whether or not Exiles was anything like the play Joyce had in mind when Yeats asked him to write, Joyce evidently hoped, in 1916, that it would be interpreted as such.

Joyce’s autobiographical arrangement produces a compelling diagram of the emergence of his dramatic work.  Within this diagram, Exiles is a ten-year composition in the line of Countess Cathleen and Riders to the Sea–but one that both completes and exceeds their representations of emergent Irish lyricism among soulful Protestant landlords and suffering semi-pagan islanders.  An exiled artist returns to the Catholic middle-class suburbs he had abandoned for Rome and struggles to transform the various forms of sexual theatricality he finds into an authentic, i.e. aesthetically and affectively empowering, confession.  For Joyce, the categories of life and drama had been entangled since his earliest critical writing.  Perhaps more importantly, in the letters he wrote to Nora in 1909 while he was in Dublin and she remained in Trieste, his experiences in the Dublin theaters, his reactions to Irish sensibilities, and his “old fever of love” for Nora were all intertwined:

I am a shell of a man: my soul is in Trieste.  You alone know me and love me.  I have been at the theatre with my father and sister–a wretched play, a disgusting audience.  I felt (as I always feel) a stranger in my own country.  Yet if you had been beside you [sic] I could have spoken into your ears the hatred and scorn I felt burning in my heart.  Perhaps you would have rebuked me but you would also have understood me.  [...]  The night we went to Madame Butterfly together you treated me most rudely.  I simply wanted to hear that beautiful delicate music in your company.  I wanted to feel your soul swaying in langour and longing as mine did when she sings the romance of her heart in the second act Un bel di: ‘One day, one day, we shall see a spire of smoke rising on the furthest verge of the sea: and then the ship appears’ (174).

Old Tabley Hall (demolished 1927)

On December 9th, 1872, A.J. Munby sent a letter to Charles Darwin, furnishing one of the many heterogenous reports from across the British empire that the famous naturalist would use to theorize emotional expression.  Munby, a prolific diarist, had been collecting images of working-class women for twenty years: sketches, descriptions, and photographs, with varying degrees of critical distance and sensationalizing staging.  His letter, which Darwin appends in a footnote to the revised edition of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, is called “a graphic description of terror,” but it reads today like a case study in the eroticization of class relations and the materiality of affective states in Victorian narrative.  Or a kind of ghost story turned inside out, so that that the mysterious stranger is no longer an enchanting figure we are alternately attracted to and repelled by, but a voyeur-position for a particular sort of observer (a situation I’m tempted to describe as taken, rather than possessed).

Here’s Munby’s set-up, explaining several possible viewing positions before locating the “I” of the story:

It was at Tabley Old Hall, in Cheshire, a mediæval house, unoccupied except by a housekeeper who lives in the kitchens, but fully furnished with its ancient furniture, and preserved in status quo by the family, as a memorial and museum.  On one side of the great hall of the house is a noble oriel window, full of shields and arms: a balcony, overlooking the hall, runs round the other three sides, and into this balcony the doors of the first floor chambers open.  I was in one of these chambers, an antique bedroom.  I stood in the middle of the floor, with the window of the room behind me, and in front of me the open doorway, through which I was looking at the sunlight tinting the oriel window across the hall. 

Then, a surprising addition (which affords several different paths for readers’ skepticism):

Being in mourning, I wore a dark suit–shooting coat, knickerbockers, and leggings; and had on a black Louis XI wideawake, the very shape of hat which Mephistopheles wears at the opera.  The window behind me of course made my whole figure seem black to a spectator in front, and I was standing perfectly still, being absorbed in watching the sunlight on the oriel. 

Munby continues (and, in many editions of Darwin’s text, the footnote rolls over onto a second page, surprising us with the length and detail of the anecdote):

Steps came shuffling along the balcony, and an old woman (she was, I believe, the housekeeper’s sister) appeared crossing the doorway.  Surprised at seeing the door open, she stopped and looked towards the room, and in looking round, she of course saw me, standing as I have described.  In an instant, with a sort of galvanic jerk, she faced me, bringing her whole figure round so that it stood parallel to mine; immediately afterwards, as if she had now realised all my horrors, she rose to her full height (she was stooping before), and stood literally on the tips of her toes, and at the same moment she threw out both her arms, placing the upper-arm nearly at right angles to her body, and the forearm at right angles to the upper-arm, so that the forearms were vertical.  Her hands, with the palms towards me, were spread wide, the thumbs and every finger stiff and standing apart.  Her head was slightly thrown back, her eyes dilated and rounded, and her mouth wide open.  She had a cap on, and I am not sure whether there was any visible erection of her hair.  In opening her mouth she uttered a wild and piercing scream, which continued during the time (perhaps two or three seconds) that she stood on her toes, and long after that; for the moment she recovered herself somewhat, she turned and fled, still screaming. 

Finally, Munby offers an ambivalent interpretation–and I begin to wonder whether the “terror” represented in the narrative is predominantly the housekeeper’s sister’s or Munby’s own.

She had taken me either for the devil or for a ghost, I forget which.  All these details of her conduct were impressed on me, as you may suppose, most vividly, for I never saw anything so strange, of the kind, before or since.  For myself, I stood gazing at her, and rooted to the spot: the reaction from my previous mood of quiet contemplation was so sudden, and her appearance so strange, that I half fancied her a thing ‘uncanny’, being in a house so old and lonesome, and I felt my own eyes dilating and mouth opening, though I did not utter a sound until she had fled; and then I realised the oddity of the situation and ran after her to reassure her (267-68, n.21).

“Oddity” barely begins to describe the situation.  Did Munby stage this encounter?  If so, what could he have been hoping for?  Was he expecting the housekeeper rather than her older sister?  Would the evident theatricality of this event, including Munby’s shadowed position as an audience for the sisters’ horror, undercut its validity as an example of intense, “unmediated” affective and emotional response?  Or would it, in its experimental simplicity–including the narrowed aperture of vision through the doorway and the limiting color spectrum of the light behind the figure–create a more empirically valuable account?

When Munby sent the letter, it had been five years since the passage of the Second Reform Act and the vast expansion of the electorate in England.  The speeches given by John Bright to mass meetings across England prior to its passage provoked Arnold’s insistence on education reform and disinterested criticism in Culture and Anarchy (1869): Bright failed to confront “pauperism and ignorance and all the questions which are called social” and instead unthinkingly glorified towns and industry; in the process, Bright had mistakenly learnt “to call the desires of the ordinary self [...] the community edicts of the national mind and laws of human progress and to give them a general, a philosophic, and an imposing expression” (quoted in Wilson, xxvii).  After the passage of the bill, conservatives followed Carlyle in worrying about the unrest across the country: bloody attempts to steal weapons and free Irish republican prisoners in Clerkenwell and Manchester, as well as anti-Catholic riots in Birmingham.  Arnold’s more moderate response, although still opposing the ignorance and violence of the “mob,” focused on critiquing various hypocritical attempts to interfere with triumphs of culture, which could only be maintained with careful attention to long-standing traditions.  In the same years, Charles Gounod’s revised version (with an added ballet) of his grand opera, Faust, had premiered in Paris in 1869 and become a cultural sensation.  How do such facts fit into the working of Munby’s letter?  How does he use the cultural value accumulating around a medieval hall in Cheshire, and how does his Mephistophelian hat work on readers?  How was it intended to work in the first place?  –And couldn’t these uses plausibly be connected to Carroll’s grinning cat?

Stensberg Park, Oslo

On April Fool’s Day in 1900, London’s Fortnightly Review included a review of the recently published edition of Henrik Ibsen’s latest play, When We Dead Awaken.  After observing the massive impact of Ibsen’s work over two generations of thinkers across two continents, the reviewer, a young James Joyce, haughtily predicts how other reviews will begin.  They will undoubtedly start by summarizing what they think are the facts at the start of the play, saying that Rubek and his wife, Maja, are “discontented” (31).  But this is what Joyce calls “a bald, clerkly version of countless, indefinable complexities,” and it wholly misses the overwhelming, sustained efficiency of Ibsen’s play: “There is from first to last hardly a superfluous word or phrase” (31).  The force and concision of Ibsen’s dramatic writing is of a different order than most plays, which “are for the most part reheated dishes—unoriginal compositions, cheerfully owlish as to heroic insight, living only in their own candid claptrap—in a word, stagey” (31).

Joyce singles out Ibsen’s remarkable “compression”: his “apparently easy dialogue” presents the “life in life of all his characters,” while succinctly analyzing the tensions between those characters “passing through different soul crises” (31).  Ibsen’s arrangement of the plot allows the audience to actively engage with the world on stage: questioning the motives of the characters, seeing how their thinking and their language have developed over time, and overhearing subtle dissonances or absences in their speech—all effects that meshed with Joyce’s growing conviction that aesthetic experiences and creations should be understood as natural processes.  A few years later Joyce would write in his Paris notebook that

the feelings of terror and pity on the one hand and the feeling of joy on the other are feelings which arrest us […] this rest is the only condition under which the images […] can be properly presented to us and properly seen by us (103).

These “states of mind” are necessary for the apprehension of beauty, which is “a quality of something seen” (103).  However, as early as his lecture “Drama and Life” in 1899, Joyce had been thinking about what we might call the phenomenological conditions for aesthetic experience: “drama is strife, evolution, movement in whatever way unfolded; it exists, before it takes form, independently; it is conditioned but not controlled by its scene” (24).  We should pause to consider Joyce’s word “evolution” here in scientific terms: in contrast to novels, which deal with “accidental manners and humours,” truly dramatic art “has to do with the underlying laws first, in all their nakedness and divine severity, and only secondarily with the motely agents who bear them out” (24).

After Joyce had learned the Ibsen had read and approved of his article, he wrote to the master to say that his review was “immature and hasty,” going on to describe his more considered opinion in terms resembling his earlier essay: “I did not tell them what bound me closest to you […] how your wilful resolution to wrest the secret from life gave me heart and how in your absolute indifference to public canons of art, friends and shibboleths you walked in the light of your inward heroism” (Letters 1.51-2; quoted OCP 294).  Yet Ibsen’s “inward heroism” is comprised of his attention to, and willingness to expose, apparently external laws.  The effect of witnessing the operation of these laws is, Joyce implies, much the same as confronting them directly.  To encounter the sudden emergence of memory and history in Ibsen’s “apparently easy dialogue” and hear the emotional convolutions in the silences throughout the theater during Ibsen’s scenes is not an experience of a straightforward representation of a domestic scene: it is more akin to perceiving the conditions for perceiving any scene, in or out of the theater, as “ordinary” and consequently as extra-ordinary. “It is hardly possible,” Joyce writes, “to criticise The Wild Duck […] one can only brood upon it as upon a personal woe” (26).

Anything else, the student Joyce had opined, is mere “chaos”—and not a deliberate, contemplated chaos but thoughtless confusion: “Lyricism parades as poetic drama, psychological conversation as literary drama, and traditional farce moves over the boards with the label of comedy affixed to it” (24).  Modern commercial theaters market various pictures—of lyrical expression, of psychological expression, and of absurdist nihilism—under the false pretenses of engaging with the “underlying laws, in all their nakedness and severity.”  Although this might seem like an exaggeration of the claims of the commercial theaters, Joyce’s target is exactly inflated rhetoric associated with the patent theaters in Dublin and the touring companies from London.  Drawing on the discourse of aesthetic idealism, these companies often marketed their products as culturally uplifting.  Theater managers and critics alike participated in the conventional discourse of beauty as the expression of truth and goodness, to the vociferous chagrin of reformers like William Archer and George Bernard Shaw.  Theaters also appropriated the discourse of aesthetic idealism for tactical reasons, attempting to evade censorship by claiming ennobling aims for salacious content.  This was especially true of the largest popular theaters in the major cities: musicals, vaudeville routines, pantomimes, Shakespeare revivals, European sensations, dances, and political melodramas all competed for funding and audiences under an increasingly artificial image of the theater as expressing a cultural ideal.  Joyce cites the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree saying that “it is the function of art to give us light rather than darkness” and that “it should not point to our relationship with monkeys but rather remind us of our affinity with angels” (27).  Joyce demurs.  Treating art “as the glass wherein they may see themselves idealised” is the product of a world in which “men and women seldom think gravely on their own impulses towards art” (27).

At this point, Joyce is unsure—or unwilling to state publicly—what those impulses might be, but he is sure that the entertaining idealizations of most popular theaters, however energetic they might be, are not the core explanation for whatever actually draws people to drama.  Joyce continues to quote Tree, but he slyly moves the attribution of the quotation further back in the sentence so as to make the reader think its first clause—a turn of phrase Tree borrows from Ibsen’s Stockmann in An Enemy of the People—is still spoken by the “I” of the previous sentence: “But after all art cannot be governed by the insincerity of the compact majority but rather by those eternal conditions, says Mr Tree, which have governed it from the first” (27).  Joyce admits this is true—partly, we imagine, because the first part of the sentence expresses a vision of aesthetic autonomy much more intense than Tree probably had in mind—but observes that “those eternal conditions are not the conditions of modern communities” (27).  These “eternal” conditions are more like the natural laws and the patterns of revulsion and attraction that Joyce had articulated in “Drama and Life.”  Modern audiences and critics “mar” art by insisting “on its religious, its moral, its beautiful, its idealising tendencies” (27).  Yet the distinction Joyce makes here is not strictly between the changeless and the changing—he is too proudly Aristotelian to abstract his own “eternal conditions” from history, and he makes sure to point out that idealist doctrines have become habitual, having “fostered a babyish instinct to dive under blankets at the mention of the bogey of realism” (28).

Joyce champions Ibsen’s drama because it remains unmarred by the doctrines and rhetoric of aesthetic idealism, but also because it provides an analytical dissection of the effects that such “idealising tendencies” have on language.  Furthermore, when Joyce turns to When We Dead Awaken, interpreting Ibsen’s play to a wider public, he begins to see how Ibsen’s analysis of idealist language extends into non-linguistic gestures and practices, even into perception and affects themselves.

Manet, Still Life: Lilacs and Roses (1883)

G.E. Moore writes that Wittgenstein concluded his lectures in the May term of 1932 with “a long discussion which he introduced by saying ‘I have always wanted to say something about the grammar of ethical expressions, or, e.g. of the word ‘God’,” but, Moore writes, “in fact he said very little about the grammar of such words as ‘God,’ and very little also about that of ethical expressions” (103).  Instead, Wittgenstein ended up discussing aesthetics in general and texts by Darwin, Frazer, and Freud in particular.  This must have been disappointing, if not entirely unexpected, for Moore, since his own arguments against “the naturalistic fallacy” depended on cutting ethics out of its entanglement with the natural sciences while also keeping it away from idealist accounts that would make it a matter of understanding forms or categories of rationality.

Ethical inquiry, for Moore, was to be grounded in neither pure reasoning nor empirical study, keeping our intuitions of the good unconstrained.  What was for Moore a briskly commonsensical sort of freedom for ethics eventually became, in Ayer and Stevenson, an exposure of ethical propositions’ basically noncognitive status. (And thus also provoking Austin’s devastating account of Ayers’ disingenuous argument from illusion in Sense and Sensibilia: “Ayer here, I think, has merely fallen into one of the traps which his own terminology has set for him, by taking it for granted that the only alternative to ‘perceiving sense-data’ is ‘perceiving material things’; thus, in place of the absurdity of seeming to take seriously the idea that we always perceive material things, we can plausibly impute to him the more rational intention of raising the question whether we ever perceive sense-data” [57].  Austin’s subtle characterization of the “insouciant latitude” that Ayer’s terms create demonstrates how it actually forecloses further argument while smuggling in “the old Berkleian, Kantian ontology of the ‘sensible manifold” in the sheep’s clothing of “linguistic” analysis [58, 61]: unlike Moore, Ayer is unaware that anything “really” important is going on at all in purportedly “noncognitive” sensations, emotions, or intuitions.)  Even without glancing ahead to Ayer and Stevenson, a number of critics early on pointed out that the sort of ethical freedom Moore seemed to have in mind tidily excluded collective action and improvements in labor in favor of love and the appreciation of beauty.  The flexibility of words in different circumstances and their potentially creative action is cordoned off in order to protect the speaker from having to account for the articulation, as well as for the “separate” or “mere” sensation, of ethical demands.

Moore writes that Wittgenstein emphasized the different grammatical functions of words “God” and “soul,” noting that religious debates are not arguments about propositions, but instead are something like struggles between different levels of language operation: different uses of”soul” differ “as, e.g., ‘chair’ differs from ‘permission to sit on a chair,’ or ‘railway’ from ‘railway accident’” (104).  Likewise, we use the word beautiful “in a hundred different games,” which do not have a single common shared trait but are part of a series of “gradual transitions”: deploying the word “beauty” to describe the smell of lilacs creates the conditions for one kind of conversation, while using it to describe the arrangement of a bed of flowers will lead to another.  One use implies a kind of judgment usually closed to debate; the other implies the prior (or even desired) existence of public standards and criteria for agreement.

To expand Wittgenstein’s sketch here a bit farther in both directions: One pulls conversation into the force-field of discourse organizing sensory perception, memory, or identity-disclosure.  The second pulls conversation into the realm of aesthetics–and, in effect, rules out what we might have seen as the emergent politics of the first conversation, i.e. how an “I” is determined in various ways by the identities disclosed in a declaration of the beauty of the smell of lilacs (unless perhaps in close discussion with a friend, for whom this declaration is not so much identity-defining as identity-opening, as in Deleuze’s attempts “to have done with judgment”).  We might even push a bit farther toward the horizon and say that the organizing force of aesthetic discourse begins to look like Heidegger’s scathing “world-picture,” i.e. it calcifies a mode of being into a sensationalized relation of beauty presented by an object to a subject, ultimately feeding into modern subjectivism.

Before we take a few steps back and return to Moore’s reactions to Wittgenstein, I think it’s worth pausing here to wonder about the impact for aesthetic inquiry if we starting thinking seriously about Wittgenstein’s remark that “specific colours in a certain spatial arrangement are not merely ‘symptoms’ that what has them also possesses a quality which we call ‘being beautiful,’ as they would be if we meant by ‘beautiful,’ e.g. ‘causing stomachache’ ” (104).  If Heidegger’s arrogant presumption (that we are too caught up in assimilating artworks as our own private “lived experiences” to care for the works themselves) can repel us, then what can we make of the pitiable image that emerges of Wittgenstein’s contemplating, perhaps even really bringing himself into confusion about, whether his sensation of a work’s beauty is caused by the same pressures or imbalances that cause stomach pains?  And why is it that aesthetic discourses tend to give art the same “symptomatic” grammar–are such discourses really so insensible to the differences?

George Frederic Watts, "The Sower of Systems" (1902)

In the second chapter of Part One, Sōseki turns to Karl Groos’s taxonomy of forms of play, adapted from his study of imitation in human and nonhuman animals’ children, to describe the “perceptual elements” and “innate tendencies” that “make their way, under the guise of various forms, into the putatively pure realm of literature” (59).   Sōseki admits that this approach has limits, especially when the content reaches a certain level of complexity, but he goes on to provide examples of literary uses of touch, temperature, taste, smell, hearing, and sight.

Sōseki draws exclusively on poetry, culling quotations in English from Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, and Tennyson, but also from the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell’s “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” the U.S. poet Charles Fenno Hoffman’s “Sparkling and Bright,” and Thomas Hood’s “Past and Present.”  Hood, editor of Hood’s Magazine and Comic Miscellany from 1844-1845, had also been the author of the tremendously popular “The Song of the Shirt,” published in Punch in 1843 (S.C. Hall, A Book of Memories [1871]).  Sōseki is less interested in these poets’ canonical status than he is in their ready-to-hand illustration of the principle under discussion: in both Japanese and English, the evocation of sensory perception “appears as a fixed rhetorical technique,” thus “testify[ing] to the generality of the principle” (61).

But Sōseki is going against the grain of the conventional idealization of these senses, deftly noting here and there that it is the excitement and use of supposedly “baser” or “unsuitable” elements of corporeality and embodiment that give literary expression its “unexpected power” (60).

Sōseki also translates a Chinese poem:

The sun quiets slowly, passing through the slats of the blinds,

The breeze pure, through a single thread of incense.

And places it next to a passage from Byron’s Childe Harolde:

The morn is up again, the dewy morn

With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom,

Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn,

And living as if earth contain’d no tomb–

And glowing into day.

Sōseki comments that “this, of course, is personification,” but “it is precisely to the degree incense carries a pleasurable association that one can say ‘with breath all incense’ ” (62).  Again, the interest lies in the capacity of literary form, in its bewilderingly sophisticated and subtle ratios, to bring supposedly “raw” perceptions, affects, and emotions together with a specific level of cognitive focus (which, as we have already seen, is itself embedded in biographical and sociological situations).

Still from Nancy Andrews, "Phantom Limb" (2010)

On the one hand, Wittgenstein is trying to look at what he calls “the grammatical difference” (grammatischen unterschied), not (merely?) the differences in use between expressions “connected to” and expressions “communicating” kinaesthetic sensations (or pain, or memory-images).  We have language-games in which we ordinarily express our skepticism about our own or another’s pain, and we have language-games in which we ordinarily do not.  Here, Wittgenstein is not investigating how we conflate one game with another, nor is he pointing out likenesses between them in the hope that we can further account for, and hence work through, our use of those words.   He is, in a sense, asking why we do this.

However, at the same time, the different voices of the remarks we have just been reading have been rejecting all the conventional, mostly representationalist, grounds for such a “why.”  Dream-images, word-associations, and experimental presuppositions do not actually create more interest by being “inner.”  Our interest emplots such phenomena as interior.  If we were to try to come up with a conventional picture of the pysche to explain different uses of “inexplicable” feelings, we might be inclined to map them as “unconscious” or strictly “somatic,” effectively separating out the language-games we find intelligible and calling them “conscious.”  (We could think of this as an ungenerous view of psychoanalysis, or of the type of incomplete analysis Freud and Lacan were continuously criticizing.)  Yet how should we understand this inclination to map our interaction with the world in this way, when its consequences are to divide the “minded” from the “nonminded” along lines that look uncomfortably like “those who have words intelligible to me” and “those who do not”?

If, as Wittgenstein taught, “an intention is embedded in a setting, in human customs and institutions” (Part 1, §337), then how do we account for the intention to “explain” a form of life unintelligible to us?  To begin with, we can follow Paul Ricoeur (developing a reading by von Wright) and begin to understand intentionality spatially (see Time and Narrative, Vol.1, 139).  Discussing modes of explanation in the study of history, Ricoeur points out that strictly causal explanations (i.e. sufficient or necessary conditions) are only fragments or subordinate elements of a much broader swirl of “non-Humean” causes.  In the case of the statement that “the First World War broke out ‘because’ the Austrian archduke was assassinated at Sarajevo in July 1914,” Ricoeur argues that, although the explanation has a causal form, “true mediation is assured by the whole range of motivations affecting the parties involved” (140-41).  In the wake of various critiques of narrative representation (often starting from Heidegger or Wittgenstein), Ricoeur is concerned to reconnect historical narrative to models of human action without reinstalling debunked teleologies or totalizing rationalizations; he hopes to complicate and deepen our understanding of history by taking us beyond the simple refusal or avoidance of mimesis (i.e. resentful empiricism), but without, as he sees it, objectifying the experience of “human” time (i.e. scientistic varieties of structuralism or semiotics; for a critique of Ricoeur’s way individualizing the experience of history, see Jameson’s long essay, “The Valences of History”).  Ricoeur’s project offers us a useful framework for understanding the stakes in Wittgenstein’s investigations of the psychology of explanation: like our desire to reduce the whorl of historical mediations of an event to a teleological proposition, our desire to reduce the alienness of unintelligible discourse leads us to exclude its mimetic and expressive features as symptoms of the very unintelligibility we wished to address.  What these pictures of our thinking share is a powerful force field of sensations — kinaesthetic and somatic at this point in Wittgenstein’s account, inferential and narrative in Ricoeur’s–that tends to be repressed or abstractly substituted when we attempt to articulate meaning as mirroring.

When one of Wittgenstein’s voices offers, apparently to the relief of his interlocutor, to “leave kinaesthetic feeling out for a moment,” we might be surprised at how quickly we want to reinstall it as an explanation.  In section 8, we had run up against one voice’s insistence that feelings are “inexplicable” and, unlike some of the more patient passages in “Part 1,” we had heard a voice reply, with something (I imagine) like irritated wonder, “But it must be possible to teach the use of words!”  And, just before the apparent relief of leaving kinaesthetic positioning behind, we had been puzzling over the enigmatic stand-alone remark that “What I am looking for now is the grammatical difference.”  If we are going to insist that whatever is going on “inside” us is “inexplicable,” then pointing out how we had learned to express, even to feel, those feelings will not help our would-be therapist.  (The Cavellian point here would, I think, be that the philosopher or the therapist–i.e. the one who speaks second–is as exposed by and vulnerable to this inexplicability as the first speaker: we risk precisely arrogance and tyranny by categorically imposing the feelings or narratives we have learned onto to the other’s words, without allowing any possible correction of our own.)  So the voice acknowledges the practical, perhaps emotional, need to set aside kinaesthesia “for the moment,” and turns to a more clearly “grammatical” pairing of cases–our uses of the words “this” and “so” in sentences like “Do this and you’ll feel so” or “this tastes so.”

This does seem to be a much more tractable difference: we can imagine a whole series of deictic gestures that might accompany “this,” and we can imagine how different those are from the moods or attitudes implied by “so.”  Or, put another way, we can imagine one series of bodily movements or physical objects that would fit the grammatical slot created by “this” in these sentences (“Do this”: read, sing, dance, walk, wince, stretch).  This series shares a different logic than the dispositions or sensations that would fit the function of “so” (“feel so”: illuminated, joyful, liberated, unconstrained, anxious, relieved).  Yet our feel for this difference, our sense of the different texture and weight of their respective uses, depends on what a number of performance theorists have called, following Joseph Roach’s influential formulation, “kinaesthetic imagination” (Cities of the Dead 27).

As Roach describes it, this practice is “a faculty of memory” to be ranged alongside “written records, spoken narratives, architectural monuments, [and] built environments” (27).  It is concentrated in performers–dancers and actors, but also politicians, negotiators, and festival participants–but works continuously in the habits of everyday life and the behavior systems encoded in laws and customs.  “Kinaesthetic imagination is,” Roach argues,

not only an impetus and method for the restoration of behavior but also a means of its imaginative expansion through those extensions of the range of bodily movements and puissances that technological invention and specialized social organization can provide (27).

Roach’s concept seems to risk the kind of vague emphasis on “texture” and “thickness” criticized in a variety of New Historicist works (where the suggestiveness of circulating energies is substituted for theoretical speculation and causal explanation), giving materialist significance to ephemeral materials and seeing the textuality in gestures while skipping materialist economics and theories of text, but we should remember that a) the tactility and affectivity Roach is discussing is, for the most part, literal, not (only) a metaphor for interpretive desire (more and less explicitly theorized in different cases of recent literary criticism); and that b) the study of specifically somatic and corporeal memory practices has had an enormous impact on a wide variety of academic disciplines, from the valuation of marginalized rituals and consumer culture to the narratology and psychology of trauma.

Roach cites the famous chapter of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, “Walking in the City,” as a methodological inspiration, but whether or not we agree with the effective politics of de Certeau’s work–as he puts it, “[t]o describe these everyday practices that produce without capitalizing” (xx)–that is, whether or not we agree that such practices do not capitalize or that their description is not itself a memorial or nostalgic appropriation, we can observe that de Certeau sees himself as working very much in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s search here for the “grammatical difference” between our explanations of “this” and “so.”  Comparing Wittgenstein to Musil’s “man without qualities,” de Certeau writes that

like Ulrich, in the area of the ‘good use of his [linguistic] abilities’ he retained the ‘marvelous clarity’ which the scientific method had sharpened–thus combining technical rigor with respect for its ‘object.’  Unlike the Expert’s discourse, Wittgenstein’s does not profit from knowledge by exchanging it against the right to speak in its name; he retains its exactingness but not its mastery (13).

There is a devastating accuracy in Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigations, but they are not the precise instruments of lens grinding.  The gestures that Wittgenstein works with can be imagined in a number of different ways, each with its own peculiar affective stances and postures, pretty much obliterating the kind of technical exactness often attributed to modern philosophical writing (especially in the analytic tradition–but see also Toril Moi’s discussion of Wittgenstein’s use of concepts as pictures versus Derrida’s demands for conceptual “exactness” in “They practice their trades in different worlds,” New Literary History 40.4, 2009, 801-24).  But de Certeau is right that there is a clarity about Wittgenstein’s work, and it emerges, I think, from the way the voices and scenes of his text sound like rehearsals.

Neither achieved performance nor exactly inscribed script, the Investigations presents a series of sketches that do not, with much precision, abstract or select even the level of the phenomenon under consideration, but they are eminently repeatable: the conceptual distinctions we may wish to make with them may change over time, or even over the course of a single reading of a single remark, but we have the sense that this history of that change is internal to the grammatical difference being rehearsed, part of a history we share with Wittgenstein’s text, not a contemporary extraction of our own minds from it.  That his remarks–and consequently that any of the thoughts “of [our] own” “stimulated” by his work–should not be “force[d] along a single track against their inclination,” was, as Wittgenstein wrote in the preface to the book as a whole, a feature of his work “connected with the very nature of the investigation.”

One way of pursuing this methodological point further would be to contrast the way the voice in remark 66 speaks of the “quite particular interest” we have in a “feeling” with the Kantian tradition of interpreting “interest” in a work as vitiating the conditions of aesthetic experience.  Nietzsche mocks Kant for “expounding the peculiarities of the sense of touch with the naïvety of a country parson,” but admires the stunning psychologization of Kant’s concept in Schopenhauer:

The situation is very odd: he interpreted the phrase ‘without’ interest’ in the most personal way possible, from an experience which, in his case, must have been one of the most frequently recurring.  There are few things about which Schopenhauer speaks with such certainty as the effect of aesthetic contemplation: according to him, it counteracts sexual ‘interestedness,’ rather like lupulin and camphor, and he never tired of singing the praises of this escape from the ‘will’ as the great advantage and use of the aesthetic condition (On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe, 74-5).

By dramatizing “disinterestedness” in such a personal, i.e. corporeal and autobiographical, manner, Schopenhauer is able to create a much more forceful and thus, for Nietzsche, a much more philosophically productive concept.  It forces readers to ask, with Nietzsche, whether such an obsessive and particular sensation can be an effect of beauty that “occurs regularly.”  Isn’t this rather a generalization of one man’s personal interest, “the most personal interest possible: that of the tortured person who frees himself from his torture?”  Nietzsche will go on to say that Schopenhauer’s style, his honest (despite himself) accounting of his own “interest,” enabled him to articulate the real logic of forces at work in the expression of ascetic ideals.  Beside this use of a philosopher’s style, we could place Wittgenstein’s parenthetical gloss on the “particular interest” we have in a feeling:

When a movement is very painful, so that the pain submerges every other slight sensation in the same place, does this make it uncertain whether you have really made this movement?  Could it lead you to make sure by looking?

Here, our own kinaesthetic imagination of certain painful gestures might allow us to see how drastic is our demand that “feelings” are neither something we consult by “looking,” nor by any “exterior,” physical form of consultation.  When we begin to imagine feelings in this way, we are already indulging in a particular fantasy about the relationship between mind and body, as well as our language and our environment.

Raja Ravi Varma, "A Portrait of a Foreigner"

In his long “Preface for Politicians,” published in front of John Bull’s Other Island in 1906, George Bernard Shaw blasted the incompetent and inhumane practices of British colonial governance, using the recent floggings and executions in Denshawai to argue that there “is no more sacred and urgent political duty on earth than the disruption, defeat, and suppression of the Empire, and, incidentally, the humanization of its supporters.”  A few months earlier, he had written to the Times mocking the Foreign Office’s ruthless “insensibility to dishonour” and Liberal hypocrisy “bound by the Gladstonian tradition to be indignantly sensitive to outrages on humanity abroad, whilst remaining disastrously reactionary and obsolete” at home (Ford, ed., Letters to the Times, 56).

We are all, of course aware that there are utilitarian reasons for flogging people.  There are also utilitarian reasons for the employment of judicial torture, for infanticide, for duelling, for cannibalism, and for bomb throwing.  The difference in public life between a civilized nation and a savage one, and in private life between a gentleman and a blackguard, is that civilization and gentility, though fully aware of the convenience and utility of these expedients, rule them out as dishounourable, and face the task of solving political and social problems by higher and nobler ends (55).

This would seem to contradict Shaw’s withering critique of notions of “honor” and “nobility” in plays like Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1892),  Arms and the Man (1894), and The Devil’s Disciple (1897), but it would help to remember that, for Shaw, the assault on deluded idealism was an ongoing task, requiring intervention at the most politically expedient moments in the most politically effective rhetoric.  Readers of the Times were much more likely to be persuaded by appeals to notions of national honor, no matter how subtly qualified Shaw may have made such appeals (even in an angry letter to the editor).

It would also be helpful to recall that Shaw’s true target, behind all the silly illusions of sexual virtue, military glory, or religious sanctimony he deflated in his plays, was the devastating avoidance of thinking clearly that he saw as the horrifying feature of modern life under capitalism: his general sense that this avoidance could be overcome by sheer vitality and bravura discipline links him to earlier Victorian writers, but the dark vein of nihilism that runs through his writing on the subject of language under modern conditions–the relentlessly bleak picture of words endless malleability in the hands of industrial powers–aligns him with the modernists and avant-gardes he increasingly talked about as both “ahead” of and “behind” his thinking. (Shaw’s situational use of “blackguard” here offers a rich context for his later application of the term, at once so anachronistic and yet so loaded with subversive appeal to a particular set of English readers, to the language of Joyce’s Ulysses.)

What makes this so hard to discover and to believe is that the false teaching is mixed up with a great deal of truth, because up to a certain point the interests of the rich are the same as the interests of everybody else. It is only where their interests differ from those of their neighbors that the deception begins For example, the rich dread railway accidents as much as the poor; consequently the law on railway accidents, the sermons about railway accidents, the school teaching about railway accidents, and the newspaper articles about them are all quite honestly directed to the purpose of preventing railway accidents. But when anyone suggests that there would be fewer railway accidents if the railwaymen worked fewer hours and had better wages, or that in the division of the railway fares between the shareholders and the workers the shareholders should get less and the workers more, or that railway travelling would be safer if the railways were in the hands of the nation like the posts and the telegraphs, there is an immediate outcry in the Press and in Parliament against such suggestions, coupled with denunciations of those who make them as Bolsheviks or whatever other epithet may be in fashion for the moment as a term of the most infamous discredit.  (From the chapter, “School, Church, and Press,” in The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and Fascism, 1928).

Walter Osborne, "The Fish Market, Patrick Street, Dublin"

Synge concludes his first letter with notes for Meyerfeld about The Well of the Saints by noting that letters will still reach him, and that he would be glad to provide further explanations, even though he will be “moving out to a very wild island off south west coast the Blasket Island, tomorrow for a couple of weeks” (122).  In other letters, Synge relayed that he happily stayed with “the King” of the Island, hiking around the mountains, rowing in curraghs during the day, and watching dances in the evenings, but he admits that he has had some trouble being “thrown back on my Irish entirely” and that he has had even more trouble finding a place to write: he sleeps in a cot in the corner, tries to read in the crowded kitchen, and is often thwarted by the “broken” weather (122-23).

Nevertheless, Synge manages to read Lady Gregory’s The White Cockade, William Boyle’s The Eloquent Dempsey, and at least one other play (which Ann Saddlemyer guesses was one of Stephen Gwynn’s).  Of Gregory’s historical drama, Synge expresses a few reservations about whether there was “current enough” in one or two scenes and ventures to say that “the language seemed a bit too figurative once or twice,” but he qualifies all his criticisms with the excuse of his difficult reading conditions: “I would like to see it again when I get back to Ireland, I feel strangely far away from stage-land, and I dont feel that my judgment now is of any value” (123).

However, writing to Yeats about Boyle and Gwynn, Synge gives no hint that his judgment about their plays had been impeded by his environment, suggesting that his rhetoric about being “far away from stage-land” is partly a tactful nod to Gregory’s prior accomplishments as a writer of dialogue and her peculiar status as Lady of Coole Park and co-director of the Abbey (see Saddlemyer, Theatre Business and Frazier, Behind the Scenes).  The one play (probably Gwynn’s) Synge dismisses as “too near the conventional historical play and has too much conventional pathos to be the sort of thing we want,” showing that, however “far away from stage-land” Synge might be traveling, he was sharply aware of the cultural market in which the new Abbey Theatre was competing.  If Synge could write to Stephen McKenna that getting away and “forget[ting] theatres and all that is connected with them” was “essential for one’s soul,” he could never seem to do so for more than a day or so at a time (88).

The company’s English tours in 1904 and 1905 played to packed houses, winning the praise of London critics for both their “naive” performance style and their “authentic” texts.  Adrian Frazier has shown how this was crucial for the company’s financial success and its strategic positioning in literary and cultural space: in London, a “fashionable audience had vindicated what a nationalist audience had vilified,” and in Oxford and Cambridge,”Synge’s The Well of the Saints, the bleak philosophy of which had soured Irish audiences, won over the more intellectual playgoers of university towns” (Behind the Scenes 169; Frazier goes on to argue that this success also exacerbated the tensions in Anne Horniman’s controversial patronage of a “national” theater company).  This success provoked a barrage of constructive and gleefully destructive criticism from the pages of nationalist publications in Dublin, but it also caused Synge to worry that the company might be slide into bad performances and bad writing if they continued to appeal to English audiences and critics.  After the first tour, Synge wrote to Frank Fay that Max Beerbohm’s review was “sensible” on technique, but collapses into “some amazing folly [...] as when he says Irishmen cannot be vulgar” (81).  “I wish,” Synge adds coldly, “he could see Sold” (81).

Claudia Mitchell discusses her myoelectric arm (2010)

Section 8 turns from the various forms of observation and perception in the preceding remarks to give the most comprehensive attempt thus far to generalize–despite opposing voices’ qualms and conditions–about the difficult object here under observation.  This opening voice is not trying to isolate the referential or expressive functions of utterances, nor the complexity of experimental and hermeneutic scenes, nor pointing to the narrative infrastructure of our pictures of consciousness and unconscousness.  Section 8 returns us to the tension between the first two sections of “Part II”: how do we reconcile our entanglement in animal forms of “bodily expression” (section 1) with the spatial and temporal dimensions of our language’s identifying functions (section 2)?

As on the opening pages of “Part II,” the arc of this section is cast out from a compellingly durable picture of embodiment toward a bracing reminder of how even this picture exists as a use of our language.  At the opening of section 8, we are offered a plausibly general experience that seems to underwrite talk about autonomous “mental” phenomena and “inner” experience: ” ‘My kinaesthetic sensations apprise me of the movements and positions of my limbs’.”  At the very least, there seems to be a “me” who is “apprised” by this information or knowledge.  The voice that responds to this assertion does not, as in previous sections, seem irritated or disdainful.  On the contrary, it takes the time to test out the idea–after all, here we no longer have to hypothesize about a “someone” experiencing certain feelings but must, always and everywhere (or at least in generalizable enough conditions) be able to share this quotation’s conviction.  So the responding voice says,

I let my index finger make an easy pendulum movement of small amplitude.  I either hardly feel it or don’t feel it at all.  Perhaps a little in the tip of the finger, as a slight tension. (Nothing at all in the joint.)  And this sensation apprises me of the movement? –for I can describe the movement exactly.

If it weren’t for that last qualification, we would think that this voice is being sarcastic: “And this, this slight or imperceptible feeling is what you call being ‘apprised’ of movement?”  But the voice does add the qualifying clause and this creates the more complicated tone that is audible throughout this remarks–oscillating between skepticism and wonder, creating a kind of slow bewilderment.  Sianne Ngai has pointed to a similarly difficult affective tone in the writing of Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett that she calls “stuplimity” (Ugly Feelings 248-98).  I would like to return to the affective tones that Wittgenstein’s text shares with literary modernism (and particularly to their shared investigation of “natural” or embodied forms of mimesis), but at this point I would simply like to point out that this section, unlike some of the others, is not pervaded by the other “negative” affects Ngai analyzes: animatedness, envy, irritation, paranoia, or anxiety.  Wittgenstein seems to have followed his own famous advice to other philosophers and slowed down, not only in terms of examining logical conditions but in the text’s more visceral, affective twitchiness to its own suggestions.

The second remark (57) in section 8 elaborates its critique of this picture, showing how saying my sensations “apprise” me rapidly invites us to say that “otherwise” we wouldn’t “know” our finger was moving.  In “Part I,” the voice responding to similar claims had targeted the assumptions in a word like “otherwise,” observing the way such a word transforms a description of an experience into a melodrama, as if all cases of our experiencing a pain were test cases.  Here the voice isolates the grammar of “knowing” in this case: “it only means,” this voice says, “being able to describe it.”  Whereas in other language-games we might distinguish between knowing and believing, or between knowing logically and knowing empirically, here, in the cases of moving our fingers and sensing the direction of a sound, our use of the word “knows” is ordinarily equivalent with our displaying “knowing” behavior, i.e. describing the finger movement or looking in the direction of the sound.

As we have already learned from previous sections, this sort of reminder of our ordinary usage is not designed to insist on strict behaviorist definitions of knowledge.  Reminders of our behavior do help us see the more diagrammatic or figural qualities of statements that might otherwise appear “purely” empirical, like the opening picture of kinaesthetic sensations as apprisals.  But behavior cannot adjudicate between “true” and “untrue” descriptions of experience–or, rather, it can be used to do so, but this would itself be an instance of the kind of representationalism being dispelled.  Furthermore, it would obscure the more characteristically modern and specifically philosophical experiences that “Part II” has been sketching: not just the illusions inherent in representational theories of mind and language, but the form of the skeptical fantasies they express.  Thus, after remark 57 gives us an apparently behaviorist reminder, the next two remarks move us through a kaleidoscope of analogies, destabilizing our sense of behavior as having “grounded” knowledge: we are told that the idea of being “apprised” of the movement of our limbs is like reducing the experience of pain-sensations to location or of memory-images to time.  We can be informed of these factors by those sensations, but, as one of Wittgenstein’s more stunning parenthetical twists reminds us, we can also be informed or apprised by “the yellowness of a photograph of its age.”

Just as the sudden experience of historicity as such can overwhelm our ability to organize a photograph into a perspectival scene with recognizable actants, we can be disoriented by a sudden attention to a single, stinging place or by a wash of associations breaking out from the recollection of a particular moment.  And this disorientation tempts us to look for the criteria (especially the definitiveness and singularity) of these experiences of time and space in all our experiences.  We might be led to ask, with remark 60, what the criteria are for being “apprised” of shape and color.  We have the whole history of art-critical discourses, from the most inflated and pretentious metaphors of taste to the most exacting taxonomies of form, to describe and explain such feelings, but confronted with a demand for the criteria of “apprisal,” these words seem to falter.  An abyss seems to open up between the “directness” of pain, memory, dreams, and kinaesthetic sensations on the one side and the now seemingly “indirect” categories or faculties “apprising” us of those sensations.

Faced with this abyss, we are habitually tempted to declare that we have run up against a defining limitation of our being: “How is one to explain a feeling?  It is something inexplicable, special.”  To which one of the voices replies: “But it must be possible to teach the use of words!”  This scene condenses a number of lessons from “Part I” of the Investigations: we have a fantasy of necessary inexpressiveness, like the diarists and monolinguists from the remarks on the idea of a private language, set against a plainspoken reminder of the various sorts of training and habituation we go through to learn words in the first place, like those given about the apprentices and beginners from the remarks on tools, rules, and games.  We are driven to gesture toward the unspeakable, despite all the reminders about how we use silences in our form of life.  However, in contrast to many of the passages in Part I, the remarks here do not rest with a momentary dispersal of the impulse to ghost our language: “What I am looking for now is the grammatical difference.”  If we were inclined to treat “Part II” as a separate project (and I am unsure about whether that is a useful way of responding), we could say that the method of grammatical investigation in Part I is giving way to a search for arts and practices which might further articulate our grammar.